In today's wireless networks, a principal concern has been how to optimize the use of scarce radio resources to support new emerging applications resident on a wireless device that use the radio resources to communicate with a remote end point. As the next generation wireless networks, such as long term evolution (LTE) networks, are being deployed, the concern has become even more critical. Further, today's wireless networks may include a multi-hop mesh topology, which may raise additional optimization challenges as there may be many possible signal paths between any given wireless device and a core network (such as an Evolved Packet Core (EPC)). Each of these different possible signal paths may have different characteristics from one another, and each path may have certain strengths and certain weaknesses, depending on the context, from a standpoint of network optimization.